Our primary results were unadjusted. This is a practice in government agencies that report national prevalence. However, we also provided adjusted results which, based on changes in p values from significant to non-significant (or vice versa), generally were consistent with unadjusted results. Notable differences occurred among men ages 60+ where the trend in binge drinking was not significant in unadjusted analyses but was significant in adjusted analyses. It was also notable that, among men born between 1946 and 1954, the unadjusted trend in current drinking was significant but the adjusted trend was not. We would therefore place less emphasis on it. However, we would not categorically state that a non-significant adjusted result invalidates a significant unadjusted result. Many studies of population prevalence report unadjusted estimates and for comparison, the unadjusted estimates in our study are warranted. In addition, more specific to our study, the permutation test we used to determine joinpoints is more accurate for unadjusted than adjusted results because adjusted estimates are additionally correlated between joinpoints because a common regression model with the same estimated regression coefficients is used to obtain the adjusted estimates for each year of the survey.
